Photography color is the technical secret to shaping your audience’s responses. Clever use of color has the ability to transform a lackluster image into a vibrant, dynamic color photograph. Read this complete guide to color photography, including the history of color photographs and essential tips for your next project.
In this article, we’ll cover:
Top left: Image generated by Shutterstock’s AI Image Generator. Clockwise: License these images via Shutterstock.AI, Denis Moskvinov, Victoria Chudinova, and Natalja Petuhova.
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1. When Was Color Photography Invented?
The first process for producing color photography was proposed in an 1855 paper by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell, in which he described a three-color method, combining red, green, and blue filters, to theoretically produce full color photography.
In 1861, the first color photograph was taken by English photographer and inventor Thomas Sutton, using knowledge of Maxwell’s method.
At first, color photography required very specialized equipment, but this began to change with the introduction of the plate screen process, invented by Irish physicist John Joly in 1894.
The Joly screen process entailed using a glass plate with very fine red, blue, and green lines, creating a filter screen which could be placed in front of the camera lens.
So, when did color photography become popular? Over the course of the early 20th century, color photography became ever more advanced and popularized.
Color photographers became increasingly in demand to produce color photographs for science and research, as well as portraits of bourgeois families and society events.
New disciplines of color photography also emerged to feed the demand for accurate, full-color photographs that captured subjects as they truly appeared, such as war photography and fashion photography.
With the invention of digital color photography in the 1950s, a steady climb towards complete sophistication in photography color has continued to this day. Now, the popularity of color photo filters has made a significant impact on how we use and respond to social media images, causing as much delight and fascination as color photography did when it was first invented back in the 19th century.
2. What Is Color Photography?
What is color photography and what technical factors contribute to creating color in photos? Color photography is a type of photography that is able to capture and replicate the colors we see in the environment around us.
Color photography is a type of photography that is able to capture and replicate the colors we see in the environment around us.
This color photography definition extends to the photography of images that closely replicate how the world looks, but a particular element can also be manipulated to create a heightened or different impression of how a subject appears in real life.
Instagram photo filters are a good example of color photography as a manipulation—as well as reflection—of the real world.
3. Essential Color Photography Techniques to Know
When we take a color photograph, or use color photos in a design or marketing campaign, we can use color theory photography and color photography elements to shape the viewer’s impression of an image.
For example, we can enhance the appearance of primary colors in photography to create a more optimistic or energetic image result, or experiment with color value photography to create a brighter or darker color photo, creating a more ethereal or moodier look.
Read on to find out more about how to manipulate individual color photography elements, including learning about advancing colors and what color saturation is, to create designs and marketing campaigns that pack a colorful punch!
We’ll take an in-depth look at each of these color photography elements:
- Advancing Colors in Color Photography
- Color Saturation in Color Photography
- Color Isolation in Color Photography
- Color Contrast in Color Photography
- Color Psychology in Color Photography
- Black and White Photography
License this image via macro.viewpoint.
1. Advancing Colors in Color Photography
Warning signs, high-visibility jackets, and the Golden Gate Bridge all have one thing in common. They feature strong, warm colors of red, orange, or yellow. This is because it’s important for people to notice these things.
Strong, warm colors are the best way to get noticed, and experienced color photographers know exactly how to enhance their impact through contrasting warmth against a cool backdrop.
In color photography, warm colors offer optimum contrast against a blue sky or ocean, as these hues sit opposite to each other on a color wheel.
In color photography, attention-grabbing warm colors are referred to as advancing colors. Meanwhile, cooler colors that fade into the background are known as receding colors.
So, why does this matter to color photographers, marketers, and designers?
Color Photography Tip: Advancing Colors
To really grab the attention of a viewer in a color photograph, use advancing colors to highlight important elements or subjects in an image. Enhance the impact of a design by using a color photograph that features high contrast between advancing and receding colors.
Put simply, choose a warm subject set against a cooler background.
For a trend-conscious spin on the psychology of advancing colors, look for color photographs that feature hot orange and teal green. Neon red and royal blue work well together, too.
Clockwise from top left: License these images via H_Ko, Golubovy, Kasefoto, and DimaBerlin.
Color Photography Tip: Receding Colors
Don’t use too many receding colors in one image.
While our attention is naturally drawn to warm colors in color photographs, cooler colors such as blue, green, and gray draw less attention to themselves. As a result, these cooler hues naturally recede into a color photo’s background.
Photos filled with only receding colors, and no warmer advancing colors, tend to look rather dull.
In the AI-generated image below, the street scene is dominated by cool, muted colors of gray and blue. In the absence of any advancing colors, the eye has no key focal point to focus on. Therefore, the overall image is muted and monotonous.
This would be quickly rectified by increasing the saturation level of the yellow tone on the building at right, making it warmer and more ‘advancing’ in the color photograph.
In this image, created using Shutterstock’s AI Image Generator, an excess of receding colors results in a dull, dreary image (left). Increasing the saturation and warmth of the yellow building at the right side of the image really helps to create contrast and make the image more attention-grabbing (right). License this image via Shutterstock.AI.
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2. Color Saturation in Color Photography
What is color saturation in photography? Sometimes referred to as “chroma,” color saturation is a measure of the intensity of color in a color photograph.
The greater the degree to which a color differs to white, the more intense and saturated the hue, increasing the vibrancy of color photographs.
Color Photography Tip: Avoid Oversaturated Images
Social media has ushered in a trend for oversaturated images, with intense color often used as a strategy to draw in easily-distracted eyes.
However, it’s important to note that excessive color saturation can make color photographs appear artificial and even unpleasant to look at. This is particularly noticeable when working with color photos that already contain a high level of color, such as seasonal summer landscapes or colorful fashion imagery.
So, if you find yourself looking at color photography through narrowed eyes due to excessive color intensity, simply reduce the saturation level to pull back the intensity of dominant colors.
This heavily saturated image was created using Shutterstock’s AI Image Generator. At left, you can see how excessive saturation of the yellow and blue colors in the image have dimmed the detail of this nighttime shot of a flower and created an overly harsh image to look at. At right, the saturation is dimmed, creating more evenness of detail across the image, and a calmer image to look at. License this image via Shutterstock.AI.
Color Photography Tip: Color Saturation in Moderation
Avoid burning your audience’s retinas by only moderately increasing the color saturation in your color photographs. Keep in mind that colorful imagery doesn’t equate to heavily saturated imagery.
As a useful example, think of the multi-colored yet calmly tonal cinematography of Wes Anderson movies. In his pastel-saturated films, color is all-important, but the intensity of the colors is often muted, to maintain an overall quaint aesthetic.
The conclusion? A little color saturation can go a long way.
A moderate saturation level won’t distract from important additional elements on your designs, such as calls-to-action (CTAs) or headlines, and will give your campaigns a mood boost to boot!
At top left, you can see how too little saturation can make an image appear dull and flat, while at bottom left, excessive saturation makes a colorful image feel too brash. A happy medium can be found at right. License this image via Yiistocking.
3. Color Isolation in Color Photography
Color isolation is when a photographer purposefully makes a particular color or color combination the dominant color photography element. Color isolation can be enhanced with the use of color editing techniques, such as using one dominant color to create a striking monochromatic effect.
Color isolation brings the eye’s focus to a particular hue in a color photograph, as well as the subject featuring that color, making it an effective technique for creating a focal point in your designs.
Color Photography Tip: Balance Monochromatic Color Isolation
Monochromatic color, in which the same color is used almost universally across the whole color photograph, can be a very effective way of using color isolation.
While it’s important to consider the psychological effect of using a single color on a color photo (for example, an all-blue image can feel cold or melancholy), you can offset any negative vibes by introducing subtle variations in color from blue‘s neighbors on the color wheel—violet and green, for example.
In the image at left, created using Shutterstock’s AI Image Generator, the monochromatic effect is too severe, making the blue colors feel too expansive and dark. It’s also difficult to see any details in the subject’s face. At right, this color photograph uses monochromatic color isolation in a more balanced way, with light and dark blue tones creating contrast and a vibrant color effect that preserves the details of the subject’s face. License these images via Shutterstock.AI and Master1305.
Color Photography Tip: Color Isolation for Brand Photography
For marketing designs and social media campaigns, color isolation is particularly effective for reinforcing brand color palettes and creating an overall stronger branded look in color photography.
If, for example, your business uses purple and yellow as part of its brand identity, you can reinforce the memorability of the brand by using imagery that prioritizes and isolates these colors.
Clockwise, from top left: License these images via Jaroslav Monchak, Apirak Wongpunsing, sema srinouljan, moomsabuy, and Bagus Production.
License this image via Natalja Petuhova.
4. Color Contrast in Color Photography
What is contrast in color photography? Color contrast uses colors that are highly contrasting from one another to create a point of difference on images.
This can be an effective technique for making color photographs feel more dramatic and helping subjects to really pop from the background.
Color Photography Tip: Use the Color Wheel
Using color theory, photography requires consideration of how different colors work in combination with each other. Some colors have natural contrast against each other (such as orange and dark blue, or white and black), while others have very little natural contrast (such as two pastel hues, or cyan blue and yellow, for example).
To ensure optimum color contrast in your color photographs, look to complementary colors, which sit opposite to each other on a color wheel. Using complementary colors will create natural contrast in your color photography, without any risk of color clashing.
All of these color photos feature complementary colors, such as teal and coral red, lime green and orange red, green and red, and dark blue and mustard yellow. Clockwise, from top left: License these images via Photo_Bait, Master1305, Nagoor Ashraf, and Jacob Lund.
Color Photography Tip: Boost the Accessibility of Websites with Color Contrast
Color contrast is particularly important to consider in relation to accessibility. Screen-based designs, such as social media posts and websites, emit light in order to generate color, which has the effect of brightening colors.
In some cases, this reduces the contrast between colors even further, making online content less clear for visually-impaired users.
What are the best colors to use on a website? Websites that use complementary colors, as above, are a fail-safe option for ensuring an accessible level of contrast in images, as these colors have a high level of distinction between them.
Use this online Color Contrast Checker tool to assess the level of contrast for website designs.
In this image, created using Shutterstock’s AI Image Generator, the lack of color contrast (left) flattens the image, making the details and depth of the street scene less clear. In the edited image (right), the complementary colors, red and blue, have been exaggerated to create a clearer and more vibrant image that would be better viewed on online websites. License this image via Shutterstock.AI.
License this image via Nils Jacobi.
5. Color Psychology in Color Photography
More than any other technical element in color photography—such as light, composition, or sharpness—color has the greatest power to influence the mood and psychological impact of a color photograph. This is because humans associate colors with ancient meanings and emotions, stemming from their presence in nature.
Color Photography Tip: Tap Into Color Psychology Within Color Photography
What does this mean to you when selecting or creating color photography? Color is an instant mood-setter for a color photograph, allowing you to have more power over how a viewer perceives color photography and designs.
Use orange to inject fun and cheerfulness. Opt for purple if you want to appear wise, spiritual, or mysterious. Meanwhile, pink softens the edges of messaging by bringing playfulness and compassion to the table.
Clockwise, from top left: License these images via Nils Jacobi, Victoria Fox, Gatot Adri, and Ryzhkov Photography.
Color Photography Tip: Avoid Negative Psychological Associations
While color psychology can be used to wield a positive influence over viewers’ psyches, it can also have undesired emotional effects.
Some colors, when used in combination or excess, have strong negative associations that are hard to shake off.
Pale green, for example, is often associated with sickness, making it a suitable choice for medical branding, perhaps, but little else!
Brown can also be a tricky color to use in color photographs from a psychological perspective. This earth color is often connected to boredom, but on the more positive end of the scale, resilience and dependability.
The good news? In your own color photography, you can easily balance out these awkward colors with colors that create psychological contrast.
For example, team ‘boring’ brown with sky blue to find a fresh, airy balancing act.
This image, created using Shutterstock’s AI Image Generator, demonstrates how color psychology can bring an unwanted mood to photography. At left, an image dominated by brown can, by association, feel dull, dreary, and energy-sapping to look at. At right demonstrates how brown’s lethargic mood can be counteracted with the addition of bright, fresh sky blue. License this image via Shutterstock.AI.
6. Black and White Photography
Think color photography is all about vibrant, colorful hues? Think again! Black and white color photography brings drama and depth to designs that colorful images can’t match in quite the same way.
Color Photography Tip: Tell a Story with Black and White Photos
By stripping vivid colors out of a color photograph, color photographers can sharply bring the focus back to the subject, creating a more minimal and impactful result.
Good examples for using black and white color photography might be travel blogs, social media designs themed around human stories, or when it’s important to put across a strong sense of gravitas and narrative.
In other words, if you want a story to be the focal point of your color photograph, opting for black and white places the emphasis firmly on the subject, rather than the distractions of styling or color.
Clockwise, from top left: License these images via Eduard Moldoveanu, Matej Kastelic, Hlib Shabashnyi, and food.kiro.
Color Photography Tip: Avoid Using Too Much Contrast
When converting your color photographs to black and white, it can be tempting to increase the contrast to avoid a grayed-out look.
However, applying too much contrast in black and white photos can diminish the details, reducing the clarity and overall balance in the photography color.
This is particularly the case for portrait photos, in which it is important to see details of features such as the eyes and mouth.
For black and white color photos, exercising restraint in contrast goes a long way.
Differing levels of contrast have been applied to these portraits, generated using Shutterstock’s AI Image Generator. The image at left uses too much contrast, which dims the details of the skin and eyes, and creates a more abstract result. The image at right uses a moderate level of contrast, which allows the viewer to see the details of the face and creates an overall more emotive portrait. License this image via Shutterstock.AI.
Conclusion: How Color Photography Creates Impactful Campaigns
Now armed with the knowledge of how color photography can transform the psychological, emotional, and visual impact of your projects, you can start to create and select photography with confidence, having a stronger idea of what you want your color photographs to achieve.
Need bold, colorful, or black and white photography for your next project? We’ve got you covered. . . .
License the images used in the cover collage via Master1305, Master1305, and Master1305.
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